Twitter developers have been given access to a new retweet API since August. Retweets are now being tested in the web interface as well. In addition, improved trending topics yield higher-quality results for trend queries.

Twitter is rolling out a new retweet button in the web interface to a select group of users, the company wrote in a blog post this past Thursday. Twitter warned that the button is activated on a tiny percentage of accounts so consider yourself lucky if you see it. Just like the retweet button found in desktop and mobile Twitter clients, it lets you forward any interesting tweet you’ve stumbled upon from the web interface, without re-typing the original tweet from scratch. Here’s how the company described the retweet button:

Retweet is a button that makes forwarding a particularly interesting tweet to all your followers very easy. In turn, we hope interesting, newsworthy, or even just plain funny information will spread quickly through the network making its way efficiently to the people who want or need to know.

Re-tweeting preserves both the contents of the original tweet and a link to a person who originally tweeted the message, which is what you should always do in the Twitter world. Otherwise, you’re stealing other people’s tweets and claiming them your own, even though they’re not. Twitter said it will “see how it goes first with this small release” before it proceeds with a staged roll out of the new button to all Twitter users. Power users might note that a Greasemonkey script called Retweet This adds a similar functionality to the web interface.

Twitter also said in another blog post that it has improved the engine behind trending topics. Because of an increasing amount of clutter in the public timeline that makes relevant topic of conversation “less interesting due to the noisiness of the conversation,” improvements to trends are underway. As a result, the company said, trend queries will yield higher-quality results by returning tweets that are more useful. This improvement won’t be immediately noticeable until it propagates throughout the entire system.

Christian’s Opinion

Twitter’s web interface is finally getting new features. Even though the web interface provides basic timeline management, you can do way more with mobile or desktop Twitter clients, like the multi-platform Tweetdeck or Tweetie for iPhone. Twitter’s web interface supports only a fraction of the features available to developers through APIs. This isn’t out of ordinary – many popular web apps expose their functionality to third-party apps via APIs.

What’s unusual here is a disproportion between basic features of the Twitter’s web interface and a way richer functionality available in third-party Twitter clients. Imagine if the Facebook web app had only basic network management features, forcing you to use third-party apps to use all the features that you now take for granted.

Yes, this strategy has worked out well for Twitter thus far – it has been nurturing a rich ecosystem of developers who that supporting the Twitter platform. That said, I’d like to see more features in the web interface and I’m glad that the company is showing willingness to address these concerns. With recently introduced Twitter lists and this retweet button the web interface will become more useful, but a lot more work needs to be done.